Doc Homage to Music Critic Robert Christgau

As a critic, it’s not exactly encouraging when you’ve been assigned to review a documentary called The Last Critic. Given the imperiled state of the profession right now, I was half expecting to watch some kind of demoralizing exposé that would have me running out to meet a career counselor afterward.

Thankfully, the film’s catchy title is never actually justified by what we see. In fact, this deep dive into the life and work of Robert Christgau, aka “the dean of American rock critics,” is the opposite of a doomsday scenario, revealing just how good criticism can be when it’s handled by a master who’s been churning out pieces for 60 years and counting.

If you’re familiar with Christgau’s writing — I discovered it in the Village Voice back in the 1990s, when that paper still existed and Christgau was its chief music critic — then you know how his capsule reviews of albums can read like perfect little prose-poems. One of the most knowledgeable music writers of our time, and also just a great writer, period, Christgau had a style and savoir-faire matched only by his productivity and longevity.

Still working hard at the ripe age of 83, he’s penned tens of thousands of texts over the past six decades, making him perhaps not the last critic but probably the longest critic. That depth of experience has allowed him to cover all the major trends of the past half-century, beginning with rock, pop, soul and funk, then moving into heavy metal, punk, postpunk and eventually techno, house and hip-hop — the latter of which Christgau championed early on.

First-time director Matty Wishnow covers lots of terrain in this rather standard feature-length doc, showing Christgau working at home on his latest annual Pazz & Jop poll (which he started at the Voice in 1971 and continues to put out each year on his personal website), with his longtime spouse and fellow journalist Carola Dibbell never too far away. In between, we flash back to Christgau’s life story, beginning with his modest childhood in Queens, then his early stints as a music critic at Esquire, Newsday and eventually the Voice, where he wound up staying for 30 years. 

Rock criticism was unheard of back when writers like Christgau, Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs first started out, forming their own niche within a greater movement that came to be known as New Journalism. While the others penned racy rockstar profiles, essays or generational think pieces, Christgau created a column at the Voice that he half-ironically called “Consumer Guide,” banging out short reviews (often less than 100 words) and giving albums letter grades like a schoolteacher.

He quickly made a reputation for himself as a make-or-break critic who could be “blunt as fuck,” as someone explains, celebrating artists like Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and The Ramones while trashing the likes of Billy Joel, Pink Floyd and The Eagles. His reviews ran short, but they were the opposite of slapdash: Christgau often listened to the same album several times over before finally passing judgement on it.

We see this in action as the critic works on his new poll from a Manhattan apartment stuffed to the brim with records, CDs, cassettes, books, magazines, newspapers and anything else he’s hoarded throughout his career. Christgau’s pack rat mentality reveals the sheer scope of his curiosity, which is why he can write as competently about rap as he can about folk, as well as being somewhat of an authority on African music. “There’s enough good stuff out there,” he tells Wishnow, implying that you just have to sift through lots of mediocrity to find it.

It’s a rather hopeful pronouncement from a writer who otherwise comes across as your classic New York curmudgeon. (Christgau quips that a French woman once said he was like “Woody Allen with long hair.”) And it explains why the judgement of someone so knowledgable has mattered for many musicians over the decades, whether they received praise like Boots Riley, when he was still the frontman of The Coup, or brutal takedowns like Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, who dissed Christgau in one of his early songs. (The critic eventually came around to Sonic Youth on some of their subsequent albums.)

Both artists are interviewed in The Last Critic alongside a handful of younger writers for whom Christgau was a major influence — and sometimes a mentor if they were lucky enough to work with him at the Voice. Especially important was his relationship with Black journalists who were as passionate about hip-hop as he was, at a time when most critics shunned it as street music unworthy of attention. (As early as 1981, Christgau listed the compilation album Greatest Rap Hits Vol. 2 as his top record of the year.)

Perhaps the only thing missing in Wishnow’s generous homage is what seems to be suggested by the title: a discussion of where criticism has gone from the ‘60s until now, and whether it still has a future. Christgau’s methods may have remained the same since he started out, but how many people even listen to albums anymore, let alone read reviews of them written by paid professionals, or what’s left of them? And how many people under the age of 20 even know what an album is?

The Last Critic never raises or answers such questions, leaving us instead with a shot of Christgau banging out another piece on his janky desktop PC, as if the times haven’t changed. It’s perhaps meant to be a reassuring image, especially for those who continue to believe that an informed opinion about art is still essential to our culture. Christgau may indeed be one of the last of his kind — hopefully this won’t be my last review.